The Until Dawn movie came out in 2025 to bad reviews.
The studio butchered the main idea.
It was supposed to be a video game adaptation, as they bought the rights, but in the end they decided to pick an already written script for another concept and slapped the Until Dawn name on it.
Therefore preventing any real adaptation from being created in the future, and tanking an original movie in the process. And now… with Hayden Panettiere‘s death, we’ll never see the game casting play their characters and it sucks.
Giving it a go despite it all
I couldn’t be bothered to catch it in theaters, as I was a fan of the OG game, and couldn’t find a reason to pay for a movie that had nothing to do with it… But luckily it hit the streaming world, so here we are.
The beginning could be a nice intro, but it kind of spoils the « not again » part of the movie that could have been a surprise.
They get bonus points for casting Peter Stormare.
Ok, while I bash on the premise, I do have to admit that I like the location of the movie, as well as the rain wall that stops at the parcel line.
There are nods here and there to the game, notably Josh’s mask, his case file, and the wendigo (which looks more like a regular zombie than anything else), the sisters, the mines and the « don’t move » situation, but all in all, it differs drastically from it. At least the characters passed through most of their QTEs.
Final destination in a time loop
Spoiler alert : the entire cast dies before the 30 minutes mark.
But don’t worry, they don’t have a worthy plot twist like Barbarian, no, they just reset to kill them all over again.
They take the original concept of the game, which is that once you’re dead, you’re completely out, and change absolutely everything.
To remind us once again that the script is for a completely different movie than the IP name it possesses.
And then it’s cliché galore. You’ve got a serial killer, ghosts, dolls, a clown, a giant, a witch…
The one good thing coming out of this is that the characters are so dumb that I don’t mind watching them die over and over again.
And then we get to the mines, except they’re followed by what look like zombies.
These are sadly not wendigos.
They don’t climb the walls or have spider-like legs. They are just humans in make up and that lacks in the execution.
We were here for the monsters, not zombies. They even dropped the tattoo storyline.
It feels longer than it is
To be honest, the movie is, oddly enough, like a hourglass. You hope it’ll get better, and then it resets.
It’s a time where you can turn your brain off, watch people get killed and move on.
It doesn’t make an impact one way or another.
It’s not as bad as some, and it’s clearly not as good as others.
They could have made that movie under a regular name and it would have just been ok.
They could have made an accurate Until Dawn adaptation and it would have been great.
Here we just get the worst of both worlds, as they fucked up a decent movie, and the potential for another.
Fucking studios, man.
My rating : 2/5 bats
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